Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Longtime Net users will remember NCSA's "What's New" page, which predated the first search engines. I wanted to find something I remembered in it, but the page is now 404. Google has several "archives" of it, but they are all either 404s themselves, or only an archive of one month of links.

Luckily, the Wayback Machine (archive.org) has a snapshot from Dec., 1996, which crawled back to the whole What's New archives. This is a great example of the power of the Wayback, and the foresight of Brewster Kahle. "What's New" was incredibly important in the history of the Web.